The reproduction of speech over loudspeakers in a reverberant environment is often encountered in daily life, as for example, in a train station or during a telephone conference. Spatial reverberation degrades intelligibility. This study proposes two perceptually motivated preprocessing approaches that are applied to the dry speech before being played into a reverberant environment. In the first algorithm, which assumes prior knowledge of the room impulse response, the amount of overlap-masking due to successive phonemes is reduced. In the second algorithm, emphasizing onsets is combined with overlap-masking. A speech intelligibility model is used to find the best parameters for these algorithms by minimizing the predicted speech reception thresholds. Listening tests show that this preprocessing method can indeed improve speech intelligibility in reverberant environments. In listening tests, Speech Reception Thresholds improved up to 6 dB.
Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.
No AES members have commented on this paper yet.
To be notified of new comments on this paper you can
subscribe to this RSS feed.
Forum users should login to see additional options.
If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.
